Johnson: Popular longtime Flames radio announcer Peter Maher goes out on top

GEORGE JOHNSON, Calgary Herald04.30.2014

Longtime Calgary Flames play by play announcer Peter Maher announced his retirement to a packed room of family, friends, former and current Flames and administration and media at the Scotiabank Saddledome on Tuesday.

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Most of all, he shared with us the sound of those glorious pipes. A set that carried the same lingering resonance in this town as Sinatra’s did for swooning bobby soxers in the ’40s or Pavarotti’s for demanding opera buffs at La Scala.

He provided the vocal soundtrack of an era. A voice that, over the years, became as familiar, as trusted, as any in your immediate family.

A voice that lifted itself up there, like lightning, with the gods. With Gallivan and Hewitt, Kelly and Cole.

“When I was back home last summer,” Peter Maher was saying Tuesday during as jam-packed a media conference as the Calgary Flames franchise has yet witnessed, “I was reminiscing with the man who brought me back into the broadcast business, Doug Young. Doug later became Canada’s Minister of Defence and other portfolios in our country, and we remain pals.

“His advice that Sunday afternoon as we sat at his place in July resonated with me all through the summer, all through the winter season:

“It’s better to leave what you do best too early, than too late.

“And that statement has tremendous impact on what my decision is today.”

In saying goodbye after over three decades, he eloquently remembered of the two sports idols of his youth, Mickey Mantle and Rocky Marciano, and how the Mick had stayed too long at the ballpark, left a shadow of his former glorious self, while the Brockton Blockbuster went out an undefeated heavyweight champion.

Peter Maher, like The Rock, left on top.

On Tuesday, he let us in on little stories, little secrets. Of how he fought off vocal woes with a sip of vinegar. How his trademark “Yeah, baby!” came out, listening to the refrain of a now-forgotten song on the radio driving home one day in late April of 1986.

In a new media-wide era — some might say epidemic — of calculated self-promotion and attention-grabbing shtick, Peter Maher remained proof that the evolution of personality could be organic.

For those of us who killed years alongside him lingering in airports before the privileged charter-only era of pro sports travel; who lived life on the road in a sense of camaraderie, drank so much awful rink coffee, swapped so many tall tales and celebrated with him as his games-called tally nudged 500, then 1,000, then 2,000, and higher, a kaleidoscopic explosion of Maher memories came flooding back Tuesday.

Watching Pete, bib at the ready, tuck into (attack might be more apt description) a lobster dinner in Boston, say, or at Bookbinders in Philly, juices flying everywhere. The two games in Tokyo against Darryl Sutter’s Sharks in a rink which featured a 3-metre diving board at one end of the swimming pool doubling as a rink. That famous night of the Jersey snowstorm fiasco with around 500 people in attendance. Badger Bob Johnson, ever the superstitious one, shifting the location of their game-day depending on the latest result, until one day he and a perplexed Maher were spotted scaling a locked penalty box. The day Canadian songbird Anne Murray, a favourite of his, called to celebrate a milestone.

Peter in the gloom of Red Square in Moscow. Peter in the bright lights of Times Square in New York. Peter with Doug Barkley or Mike Rogers or, for a year anyway, Peter Loubardias in the broadcast booth.

The night he sliced his head open in the booth at the Dome and called the game with a serviette soaking up the blood (in the intermission, CFR boss Don Armstrong impishly brought him up a helmet). Being on the tarmac in Pittsburgh one long-ago early morning after the equipment truck had backed up into the charter plane that was supposed to whisk the Flames to their next stop, and the players hauling out their bags to use as nets for an impromptu game of volleyball at 3 o’clock in the morning, Peter sitting on the bus, huddled from the chill, shaking his head in disbelief.

The rest of us, through the passing of the years, got old. Pete never had the time. He was having too much fun. As a result of that, those indelible moments in franchise history are, for many of us, as much audio as visual. Jari Kurri giving up that one last shot in the Game 7 upset of the might Oil up north. Lanny McDonald peeling away after scoring the go-ahead goal on May 25th, 1989 at the Montreal Forum. McDonald’s 500th. Iginla’s 500th. Martin Gelinas’ OT heroics in ’04.

If McDonald and Theoren Fleury and Joe Nieuwendyk and Mike Vernon and Al MacInnis and Jarome Iginla are rightly regarded as franchise icons, well, they can move over.

This guy outlasted ’em all.

“In the mid-80s I got a TV offer to move back to Toronto and broadcast Maple Leaf games on television,” Maher reminisced. “I didn’t take that offer. I stayed here in Calgary. And thanks to that I had the good fortune to be along for the ride to three Flames’ Stanley Cup finals — in 1986, 1989 and 2004.

“If I’d gone to Toronto, I wouldn’t have had any of that.”

On August 4th, he reminded everyone on hand, Rod Stewart, his favourite singer, would be back at the Scotiabank Saddledome to set an appearance record for non-athletes, staging his 12th concert.

“If you happen to be in the crowd when he sings ‘Forever Young’,” he said, “think of me.”

He’s there in the Hockey Hall of Fame, naturally. But more importantly, Peter Maher remains etched in our consciousness, seared into our memory banks, the sound of that voice, those amazing pipes, playing in a loop we never tire of hearing.

“The game of hockey and the Flames have been so good to me ... words cannot express,” he said in leaving on Tuesday. “I’ve experienced so many wonderful times and been involved with so many excellent, splendid people over so many years.

“Things that other people can dream about, or only wish they had the opportunity to have, I was able experience first-hand. No regrets.”

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Johnson: Popular longtime Flames radio announcer Peter Maher goes out on top

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